Mizzou Tigers

Monday’s tragedy in Boston saw an outpouring of gracious acts in the wake of sadness. One of those acts came from former Rams wide receiver Danny Amendola, who made a pledge on Twitter to support the victims of the bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon.

I will DONATE $100 for EVERY pass I catch next season to whatever “Boston Marathon Relief Fund” there is. And $200 for any dropped pass.

The record for receptions in a season is 143 (Marvin Harrison, 2002). Even if Amendola matches this feat, his new five-year deal worth $28.5 million with the Patriots should provide some cushion. Nevertheless, it’s a noble announcement. The real kicker here is his last statement, in which Amendola states that double will be donated for dropped passes.

Another kind gesture? Absolutely.

As an aside, this sets up quite nicely for Amendola, who has big (tiny) shoes to fill in Boston with the departure of Wes Welker. A dropped pass by Amendola may insight cheers instead of jeers this season. That’s brilliant.

While the world rightfully applauded Amendola for his kind gesture, Mizzou wide receiver used it as an opportunity to network.

Timely.

TJ Moe was a slot receiver for Mizzou and is entering the NFL Draft this year. He draws strong comparisons to Wes Welker and Danny Amendola thanks to his versatility, size and whiteness.

But there has to be other ways to connect with personal mentors. Send an email, have your athletic director reach out to Patriots PR. Something, anything other than responding to a tweet about a Boston Marathon Relief Fund.

In an unfortunate way, Mizzou is a fairly notable school when it comes to the NCAA Tournament. The Tigers have earned the prestigious title of “most tournament appearances without making a Final Four”, and can also stand toe-to-toe with most others when it comes to suffering brutal tournament losses.

Mizzou has experienced many variations of depressing tournament beat down. The crushing buzzer beaters, the inexplicable upset loss that spawns a Cinderella story and most everything in between.

With their first round game set for Thursday night, it seems appropriate to rank the most brutal losses in Mizzou’s Tournament history. Typically, we’d limit it to five entries, but c’mon this is Mizzou we’re talking about. Five wasn’t enough…

6.) Rhode Island 87, Mizzou 80 (March 17, 1988)

A team that featured four eventual NBA players in Derrick Chievous, Byron Irvin, Doug Smith and 7-footer Gary Leonard, came into the season ranked #15, but fell into a late season tailspin.

Going in as a 6 seed, the Tigers were favored to take down relatively unknown Rhode Island, but instead took another step towards strengthening their reputation as Tournament first round chokers. Tom Penders’ Rhode Island team added Syracuse as another upset victim before taking Duke to the wire in the Sweet 16.

5.) Xavier 70, Mizzou 69 (Mach 12, 1987)

The Band-Aid Man, Derrick Chievous posted a career high 24 points a game and carried the Tigers into the the Top 15 in the nation and a 4 seed in the Tournament. They ended the regular season on an 8-game win streak, won the Big 8 regular season and conference tournament titles and added a horrible team rap video to their accomplishments. They were hot.

But in typical Mizzou fashion, they cooled themselves down just long enough to let up and coming 13 seed Xavier knock them out by a single point. As much as fans wanted them to turn that emotion into a team power ballad video, they left us hanging.

4.) Houston 79, Mizzou 78 (March 19, 1982)

Legends Jon Sunvold, Ricky Frazier and Steve Stipanovich carried the Tigers to a top 5 ranking in early January and kept them there through the start of the Tournament where they landed a #2 seed and first round bye.

The Sweet 16 is where they met up with Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler’s Phi Slamma Jamma and took only their fourth loss of the season, derailing what was likely their most realistic shot at a National Championship.

Just as an added gut punch, this loss took place at a joint you may have heard off called “The Arena” right here in St. Louis.

3.) Northern Iowa 74, Mizzou 71 (March 16, 1990)

Anytime you follow a team that is led by two of the best players in school history (Anthony Peeler and Doug Smith) and held the #1 spot in the rankings for four weeks during the season, you’re pretty much banking on them making at least a bit of noise in the Tourney.

Instead, Mizzou fans got to see one of the most promising teams in their history get beat by #14 seed Northern Iowa on a dramatic, last-second three pointer that seemed like it was tossed up from roughly 50 feet out. The Tigers had already established themselves as a shaky tournament team over the years, but this was the final nail in the coffin and rated as the biggest first round upset of the 1990 tournament.

2.) UCLA 75, Mizzou 74 (March 19, 1995)

No explanation needed. In fact, if you want to see a replay of Tyus Endey’s now-famous end-to-end layup with under five seconds to go in the game, just watch CBS because they’re sure to play it about 20 times in their intro/outro montages.

The Tigers probably weren’t going to win the national championship if they beat UCLA, but it still doesn’t feel good when your team gets kicked in the nads on national television and you get to relive it annually.

1.) Norfolk State 86, Mizzou 84 (March 16, 2012)

This one still stings, folks. The Tigers rallied around new coach Frank Haith and put up a 30-4 regular season record including a Big 12 Tournament championship in their final year in the conference. Going in to the tournament, this team just seemed different than its predecessors. It was too consistent, too disciplined to lose a fluke game in the first round. They had been so damn good Mizzou fans were justifiably pissed that they received a #2 seed.

Even the freaking president thought they were going to the Final Four.

It took two hours to flush all that down the toilet and instead the 2012 Tigers limped back to Columbia and into the history books as one of the unfortunate handful of #2 seeds that were knocked off in the opening round. As for Norfolk State? They went on to get destroyed by 34 in the second round against Florida. So much for getting beaten by Cinderella.

The one benefit of the 2013 Mizzou team’s maddening inconsistency is that, should they lose tomorrow as a #9 seed against Colorado State, it probably won’t make this list next year.

For as much as the Arkansas faithful refuse to concede that Mizzou has emerged as a natural rival in basketball, they are far less stubborn when it comes to firing off shots on their favorite message board, Hogville.net. For every 1 unfortunate soul that is crushed when they find out they have not stumbled onto an obese fetish dating site, there were 10 that saw an opportunity last night to air their grievances specifically aimed at Mizzou coach Frank Haith.

It started with the matter-of-Hog-fact statement on the future of each team…

Then it got personal when Haith stormed onto the court yelling in his predecessor’s direction during a timeout…

Soon the 90′s sitcom-based insults were flowing…

Before long they morphed into familiar territory when sexual preference was introduced…

And without fail, the lifeblood of any anonymous message board – the angry meathead – strolled into the party…

In the end, it was a clinical performance by the Razorback faithful. Being dismantled on the court by the team representing a border state is never a fun thing to experience, but so long as you can channel your frustration into a written assault crafted under an untraceable pseudonym then, as a fan, you’ve held up your end of the bargain.

On the heels of Mizzou’s upset victory over #5 Florida last night, the mood-killing NCAA dropped the bomb on coach Frank Haith that they had formally delivered his Notice of Allegations related to accusations lobbed by the infamous booster Nevin Shapiro during Haith’s tenure at Miami.

Initial reports last month by Jeff Goodman of CBS Sports had Haith getting slapped with the dreaded “unethical conduct” charge the NCAA equivalent of a pink slip.

Since that report, the NCAA has gone out of its way to concede that it’s investigation was conducted by bumbling fools and KU grads who no longer have their jobs, with the situation becoming so comical that many believed it was unlikely that the any Notice of Allegations would be delivered to Miami or Haith for fear of legal ramifications the NCAA might spark.

Alas, last night they followed through with their promise. But as Haith’s comments and several reports have confirmed, the NCAA’s allegations against him were significantly downgraded to a step above “we are eating crow”. In fact, the JSF Investigation team was able to grab a copy of the letter presented to Haith and it spoke volumes…

If ever there was an organization unqualified to accuse another of a “failure to monitor” it is the mess known as the NCAA.

It took only a few short days for Mizzou fans to start recognizing that the enemy in the Frank Haith investigation looked very familiar.

Over the last 24 hours, what was rumored to be a substantial notice of allegations against Haith during his time at Miami, has been flipped on its head when the NCAA came out and publicly acknowledged how bad they had bungled their investigation of the University of Miami athletic programs. So badly in fact that they have put the Miami case on hold and are rolling out an investigation of their own NCAA Enforcement Program.

Who was leading said Miami investigation you ask? We’ll let this little nugget explain…

Ok sure, the lead investigator was Abigail Grantstein who was also the girl who was fired from her job after her meathead boyfriend started spouting off on an airplane about why Shabazz Muhammed would never play for UCLA (he is, by the way). But why is Abigail an enemy of Mizzou?

Having spent time working in a straight and narrow institution such as the KU athletic department while earning her KU law degree, there is no doubt that Ms. Grantstein had a sinister smile creep across her face when the file labeled “Frank Haith” was dropped on her desk.

The two teams may never play basketball again, but she had the power to kick Mizzou in the junk once more for old times sake and she wasn’t about to let that opportunity go to waste.

Oh sure, we recognize that it’s a substantial leap of faith to presume that an NCAA investigator was petty enough to veer way outside of her procedural limitations all in a desperate effort to throw the book at a man simply because is affiliated with her arch rival. But if the NCAA Enforcement Program has taught us anything over the years, it’s that using scant – and sometimes illegally obtained – evidence to draw wild, sweeping conclusions despite the inability to prove any of it…well, that’s completely acceptable when it comes to college sports.

The only thing that we don’t understand is how she got the job at the NCAA when she showed up to her interview dressed like this.

With 2013 only one month old, we’ve already seen the first of what promises to be many social media phenomenons go mainstream and sweep across the nation. Just like Facebook originated on college campuses, so too has what’s now known as the #Boobment on Twitter.

If you are not familiar, the concept isn’t hard to grasp – college women put on their school licensed apparel, take a picture of their strategically-covered-so-as-not-to-be-explicit jugs in said apparel and send it to the associated Twitter account to be posted anonymously. In other words, it’s the perfect concoction for college sports meatheads fans.

Per the recent Huffington Post article, the #boobment was born during the Mizzou-Kansas basketball classic at Allen Fieldhouse last year when a female fan tweeted a photo of her wearing a Jayhawks shirt prominently featuring her school spirit (read: cleavage) under the hashtag #KUBoobs. Other female KU fans followed suit and the trend was formalized with the creation of the Twitter account @KUboobs, believed by most to be the George Washington of college boob-centric Twitter feeds.

As one would expect, not long after @KUboobs exploded, Mizzou countered with their own version – @MizzouBoobs1 – and promptly engaged in some competitive banter with their arch rivals. Hell, even local private Jesuit schools have gotten in on the action.

As the movement has swelled on college campuses it has now begun to spill over into the professional sports landscape. Within days after the media exposed this booming trend, pioneer fans of two St. Louis sports franchises set out to strategically attack the ballooning market.

While the Cardinals remain the undisputed leader in the STL sports hierarchy, their social media boobprint has yet to take hold while their hockey counterpart piggybacked on the NHL season opener to rack up almost a thousand followers before they ever sent out a tweet. While the photos haven’t started overflowing the inbox for either, the seeds have been planted.

We don’t know how large this trend will grow across the country, but what we do know is that as long as male sports fans remain on Twitter, there will be an audience supporting the #boobment.